During the past 10 years, companies have made significant investments to configure robust networks to support burgeoning applications, transactions and communications over the Internet. Yet, the majority of tools to support network operations have been focused on internal Local Area Networks (LANs), despite the demand to support external business applications. As a result, Global Networks have been managed locally without a clear picture of performance, operational requirements, or the allocation of network resources across multiple Internet Service Providers (ISPs).
Further, the internal hardware, software and traps, typically used in the prior art to gather network intelligence, has only limited application across the diverse network segments that today make up an enterprise's Global Network, such as data (including Internet Protocol (IP)), wireless (including Wireless Access Point (WAP) access and equipment), voice (including Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)) and Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Different sets of tools have been required to monitor each of these different segment types.
Accordingly, there is a need to gauge the performance of Global Networks, including ISP quality of service and device performance from a single integrated interface across diverse network segments.
The present invention answers this need by enabling clients to remotely monitor disparate networks and service providers over a real-time Wide Area Network (WAN)-based interface without displacing internal management applications.